ActiveRain Valued at $8.5 Million

May 15, 2008 – 8:58 am
On November 16, 2007, HouseValues acquired 32.4% of the outstanding voting stock of ActiveRain, the online real estate community, for $2.75 million. This gave ActiveRain an evaluation of around $8,500,000 or $100 per registered user. ActiveRain currently has over 85,000 members on the site.

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Interesting Thought on Beating Google

May 14, 2008 – 4:33 pm
Mark Cuban suggests. How many websites would have to recuse themselves from the Google Index before Google Search was negatively impacted ? Mahalo.com thinks it needs to support the 25k most common search terms in order to be successful. What would happen if MicroSoft or Yahoo or a MicroHoo went to the 5 top results for the top 25k searches and paid them to leave the Google Index ? A theoretical maximum of 125k sites, but with overlap, probably closer to 100k or less, times how much per site on average ? The math starts to get interesting. At $1,000 per site average times 100k sites, thats only $ 1 Billion Dollars. The distribution would obviously favor the larger sites, so of that billion dollars, would the top 1k sites take 500k each and the remaining 99k split the rest ? Given the stakes, why stop at $ 1 Billion Dollars ? Would the ...

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Trulia Beats Zillow in Twittering

May 14, 2008 – 4:06 pm
First off. What is Twitter? Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? I just started getting into twittering and to be honest I think it is stupid. I barely have enough time to take a shower no less tell the world what I am doing at any given moment in time. With all this said, Twitter, is becoming a potential marketing machine. Compete.com estimates their monthly traffic to be about 1.1 million uniques a month. This estimate is most likely way low since many users twitter using their phone. One real estate company that has taken advantage of this marketing conversation is Trulia.com. Using the twitter search service Summize, we can see that for the last 30 days there has been a total of 645 tweets with Trulia mentioned and 210 ...

Posted in zillow | 3 Comments »

Rentals.com Revenue Down 2.8% for Q1 2008

May 12, 2008 – 2:52 pm
Rentals.com revenue was down 2.8% for Q1 of 2008 compared to Q1 of 2007. For Primedia, rentals.com parent company, EBITA (Earnings Before Taxes Interest Depreciation and Amortization) was down 9.4% for the 1st quarter of 2008 compared to the first quarter of 2007 Fiscal 2008 Outlook Apartments – Occupancy rates in the apartment leasing sector in most markets have moved to more normalized levels, increasing the demand for advertising. However, construction levels are expected to remain low, and the Company does not expect significant additional apartment inventory in 2008. Increases in available units contribute to additional growth opportunities. The Company’s current focus is to ...

Posted in Rentals.com | 2 Comments »

10 Fastest Growing Real Estate Markets

May 11, 2008 – 6:55 pm
CNNMoney just released their report of the 10 fastest growing real estate markets. And here they are: McAllen, Texas 12-month forecast: 4% Median home price: $109,000 One year price change: 2.1% Five year price change: 23.3% Change in foreclosure rate: 23%   Rochester, N.Y.   12-month forecast: 2.7% Median home price: $121,000 One year price change: 3.4% Five year price change: 20.1% Change in foreclosure rate: 5%   Birmingham, Alabama   12-month forecast: 2.7% Median home price: $156,000 One year price change: 2.9% Five year price change: 29.4% Change in foreclosure rate: 20%   Syracuse, N.Y.   12-month forecast: 2.6% Median home price: $126,000 One year price change: 0.8% Five year price change: 29.5% Change in foreclosure rate: 27%   Buffalo/Niagara Falls, N.Y.   12-month forecast: 2.4% Median home price: $105,000 One year price change: 1.6% Five year price change: 24.5% Change in foreclosure rate: 14%   New Orleans, La.   12-month forecast: 2.2% Median home price: $158,000 One year price change: 1% Five year price change: 43.7% Change in foreclosure rate: 49% Scranton, P.A.   12-month forecast: 2.2% Median home price: $128,000 One year price change: 7.2% Five year price change: 41.1% Change in foreclosure rate: 8%   Grand Rapids, Mich.   12-month forecast: 1.9% Median home price: ...

Posted in Real Estate Investing, Real Estate News | No Comments »

66 Real Estate Services Every Agent, Property Manager and Investor Should Know

May 9, 2008 – 3:36 pm
We wanted to aggregate a list of the top 66 real estate services that we think every Real Estate Agent, Property Manager and Investor should know about. Why 66. We don't know but this list will continue to get larger with your help. Our Methodology - We used resources from the Inman Wiki, Zillow Wiki, and other real estate sources to determine what sites to add to this list. We also used total unique visitor data from compete.com and have only added business to consumer sites with more than 50,000 unique visitors in the US and business to business sites of more than 10,000 unique visitors in the US for the month of April 2008. If your site meets the above criteria, comment and we may add it to this list. Real Estate Communities: ActiveRain - Social network for for Real Estate - ActiveRain RealTown - Real estate blogs, network, Groups - RealTown BiggerPockets - ...

Posted in Real Estate Technology | 4 Comments »

My Type of Home - The Power of Language

May 7, 2008 – 6:54 pm
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Trulia Valued at $150 - $200 Million

May 7, 2008 – 1:06 pm
AltSearchEngines has written a post on potential acquisitions for Microsoft. One of these potential acquisitions is Trulia.com.  Sramana Mitra, the author of this post values Trulia at  $150 - $200 million. Trulia: Real Estate search engine Trulia can be a good trunk to build Microsoft a strong presence in the Real Estate vertical. Valuation: $100-150 Million. Strategy: Acquire another 3-4 vertical portals in Real Estate with a total budget of $1 Billion, including a couple of public companies like ZipRealty. Pete Flint, Trulia's CEO recently said they are on track to be profitable by the end of the year. Trulia currently has around 50 - 60 employees.  To reach profitability they may need to reach $8 - $10 million in revenue by the end of the year. The valuation at $150 - $200 million may be a little bit high with a 10 times revenue buyout but if the multiple is higher at ...

Posted in Search Engines | 1 Comment »

Stop, it’s Krunching Time.

May 6, 2008 – 10:20 am
Krunching, a real estate investment tool site launched this week. Krunching analyzes investment properties and gives you information to help you make informed real estate investing decisions. Their database seems robust but I did not find information on one address. When you type in an address and Zip Code for a property in their data base you will get: County Records Comps Investment Summary Investment Detail Area Statistics County Records Comps Investment Summary Investment Detail Area Statistics As a real estate investor myself I like the fact that I can get all of the investment information in one place. Krunching has a lot of competition. There are a lot of real estate investing tools out there but this seems the easiest to use and is free. One large potential competitor in this space is Zillow. Zillow has all of this data and then some and if Zillow were to add these type of real estate investment tools it could great increase their ...

Posted in Real Estate Investing | No Comments »

VaultWare Online Marketing Index

May 1, 2008 – 9:57 pm
Vaultware (Realty DataTrust Corporation) offers online leasing solutions for the multifamily housing industry that allow consumers to easily rent an apartment online. Each month, VaultWare releases online apartment marketing trends and reports. There is a lot of great information in these reports as it relates to the apartment industry. Below are some graphs from VaultWare for the month of February, 2008: This graph shows the cyclical nature of the apartment industry. The single family home rental market as well as for sale properties see the same type of consumer behavior. The below graph is interesting. It shows the average number of reservations per property (apartment community) per month for each ILS (Individual Listing Service). To view what a conversion rate of users who saw an ad and converted into a reservation, we must first view the total unique visitors, page views or sessions for each of the ILS's. Below is a graph of the average ...

Posted in Vaultware | 1 Comment »

Average Rental Rates and Prices in Top US Cities

April 30, 2008 – 4:00 pm
Our launch yesterday of our free rental rates tool has been a huge success. With the massive amounts of data we receive each day for rental properties, we now have the ability to show current and historic rental rates at the city level. Below is a list of some of the top cities and their average rental price for each bedroom. You can look at any city by playing with the free rental price tool on our rentBits.com home page. This data is the average rental price for the month of April, 2008. Average rental rates / prices in New York, NY 1 Bedroom = $2,362 2 Bedroom = $3,518 3 Bedroom = $5,968 Average rental rates / prices in Los Angeles, CA 1 Bedroom = $1,583 2 Bedroom = $2,037 3 Bedroom = $2,744 Average rental rates / prices in Chicago, IL 1 Bedroom = $1,296 2 Bedroom = $1,794 3 Bedroom = $2,286 Average rental rates / prices in Phoenix, AZ 1 ...

Posted in Free Rental Rates Tool | No Comments »

rentBits Launches Free Average Rental Price Widget

April 29, 2008 – 1:46 pm
At rentBits, we aim to offer renters tools to find the perfect rental. We also take feedback to make our product better. One request from renters and property managers was to add a tool where an average rental price could be seen for any city in the United States. With that said, we just launched a free average rental price widget that renters can use on our home page, as well as a free rental price widget property managers can add to their website and offer visitors historical rental rates for their area. Below is what the widget looks like when applied to a website or blog: var rbw_height = "365px"; var rbw_width = "330px"; var rbw_location = "Denver, CO"; var rbw_url = "http://rentbits.com/rb/pageinc.do?p=widget-avg-price&loc=Denver, CO"; Get this widget Houses for rent in Denver, CO Some common questions about the widget: Is this widget free? answer: Yes Where do you ...

Posted in RentBits | 2 Comments »

Kijiji to no Longer accept XML Feeds

April 28, 2008 – 7:12 pm
Kijiji, the popular site that will surpass Craigslist in the next 5 years is no longer accepting XML feeds.  I think this is a great move on Kijiji's part to eliminate much of the HTML postings that many of these sites use to post to Kijiji. Seems like Craigslist may also go this route in eliminating most of the HTML allowed on the site. Feedback from both Kijiji and Craigslist is that in some cases, there are complaints from the community on the type of HTML ads that are posted to the community.

Posted in kijiji | 2 Comments »

Rentals.com Giving Away Ads - BOGO

April 28, 2008 – 6:38 pm
Rentals.com is offering another BOGO offer in certain areas. Similar to the one here. Below is an email they are sending out: I am pleased to offer a one-time B.O.G.O (Buy One Get One) FREE offer to you.  For all ads you purchase today (April 28th, 2008) until Wednesday (April 30th, 2008) you will receive an equal amount of free ads for future use.  If you post 1 standard ad you will get 1 standard ad to use for free in the future.  If you purchase 10 Premier Network of Sites ads you will get 10 Premier Network of Sites ads to be used in the future.  Simple. To take advantage of this offer: 1.      Post your ads prior to Midnight, Wednesday, April 30th 2008. 2.      "Reply" to this email with the ad numbers you posted April 28th until April 30th. 3.      I will credit your account with an equal ...

Posted in Rentals.com | 3 Comments »

Hillside Villas - The Apartments Made Famous by MTV

April 26, 2008 – 6:53 pm
I just read a blog post on MyNewPlace that said their traffic for the keyword Hillside Villas has gone through the roof. For those of you who don't know the Hillside Villas Apartments, they are the famous apartments that much of "The Hills" tv show is filmed in. Below is a daily traffic graph for the term Hillside Villas as it relates to MyNewPlace.  Too cool.

Posted in MyNewPlace | 2 Comments »

Is Expedia Listening to My Audio?

April 26, 2008 – 6:19 pm
I just got done listening to a great radio interview with Rich Barton, the CEO of Zillow and Founder of Expedia.com. The interview can be found on MadeFromScratch. Rich talks about his days at Microsoft where he founded Expedia at the age of 25 as well as his reasons for founding Zillow.com the massive real estate home evaluation site. While listening to the radio show I was checking email and received this from Expedia: Save up to 30% in our Summer of Adventure   The Summer of Adventure is here!   Huge savings, trips inspired by Indiana Jones™, and much, much more Vacation Sale: Save up to 30% on more than 220 destinations. Shop now Indiana Jones™ Travel Experiences: Custom tours to exotic locales including Peru and Nepal, made famous by Indy. Learn more Trip Finder: More than 200 unique getaways, popular destinations, lots of surprises! Find your trip     Two trips of a lifetime could be yours Enter the ...

Posted in zillow | 1 Comment »

Craigslist May Limit the Amount of HTML they Allow

April 21, 2008 – 4:07 pm
Craigslist may limit the amount of html they allow because of excessive abuse from scammers and spammers. Here is what Craigslist has written on their site: We're contemplating limiting HTML in classified ads to a specific list of tags. Unfortunately, much of the HTML in postings these days is used by spammers for harmful purposes, such as cloaking spam links, embedding false keywords, and overriding the flagging system. Given the relatively limited value of complex HTML markup in the context of a classified ad (many users are annoyed by it even when well-intentioned), we are considering limiting HTML in postings to a few basic tags. The following is a draft "help" page that would explain which tags are available and how to use them. There is also a link to a more detailed list. Questions or comments? Visit the discussion forum for this proposal. Inman news suggests that many real estate 'spammy' ads may come from ...

Posted in Craigslist | No Comments »

Q1 Newspaper Revenues Down - Ouch

April 21, 2008 – 12:31 pm
Greg Sterling wrote a post on newspaper Q1 earnings report. For Gannett, Real Estate revenues were  down 26.3%. For NY Times revenues decreased buy 6.4% compared with the same month a year ago. The Times ad revenue was down 9.2%.

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Top 11 Things Renters Want when Searching on a Rental Site

April 15, 2008 – 9:06 pm
Lisa Trosien over at the ApartmentMarketingBlog offers the top 11 things renters want when search on a rental site. 1. Prices 2. Amenities 3. Availability 4. Photos 5. Floor plans 6. Map 7. Proximity to work 8. Length of lease 9. Crime rates 10. Videos 11. Proximity to schools

Posted in Rental Tips, rental sites | 5 Comments »

Consumer Psychology Towards Prices - Pricing your Rental

April 12, 2008 – 4:44 pm
Odd Number Pricing From - Ohio State University Fact Sheet Odd number pricing refers to setting a price just below the psychological breaks in the dollar, such as a price is set at 49 cents or 99 cents rather than 50 cents or $1. Prices may be set at 19 cents or 49 cents or $19.95. This gives the psychological impression to the customer that the price is not 20 cents or 50 cents or $20, but less. Odd number pricing is often avoided in prestige stores or with higher priced items. An expensive dress could be priced at $150, not $149.95. Prestige Pricing Prestige pricing refers to high markups and/or pricing above the market. Many consumers are willing to pay more for a product or service because it is felt the product or service is of higher quality or possesses brand or manufacturer prestige. Usually above-market pricing can be done only when the ...

Posted in Real Estate Tips, Rental Tips | No Comments »

Successful Rental Marketing Tips for Google Adwords

April 12, 2008 – 4:40 pm
I wanted to share some secrets and marketing techniques for Google Adwords. These tips are meant for the moderate to expert adwords user. If you apply these techniques to your ad campaigns, you will see a dramatic increase in CTR (Click Through Rates) and Conversions. Which means more sales and leads. There are many little secrets and this is part one of many more parts to come. Marketing Tip # 1 - Increase your CTR through the {KeyWord} Insertion Take advantage of the not so known {KeyWord} insertion Technique. Example: When a user searches for a term, lets say "homes for rent in denver", Google will bold all search terms within the ads. When your headline matches the search term, the more likely a user will click on your ad because they know it is very relevant to their search. They might see an ad like this: Homes For Rent in Denver Search for Homes, Townhomes, Condos For ...

Posted in Search Engines | No Comments »

Giving up Personal Information for A Better Rental Search Experience

April 12, 2008 – 4:26 pm
While I was at Google, Larry and Sergey used to always say that out of 10, Google search is a 1. Even though Google is the #1 search engine on earth, there is still so much it can do to improve. From the FT: Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world's information. "We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation."...."We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don't know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google's expansion." "The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I ...

Posted in Search Engines | No Comments »

The Internet Is Becoming more Vertical - The Rental Market

April 12, 2008 – 4:24 pm
A great blog article written by Cory Treffiletti of online spin talks about how advertising is becoming much more vertical to reach the long tail of users.  Advertising platforms are becoming the #1 destination to reach a more targeted audience. "All of these models signal the shift away from large aggregate audiences towards the development of solutions to reach the long tail and provide advertisers with the ability to go deeper into the lives of their audience." "These long-tail vertical networks provide access to a targeted audience at a lower cost, in a way that is attractive to advertisers." Rent Marketer and Apartment Marketer are great examples of vertical distribution platforms that provide advertisers the tools and services necessary to reach a targeted audience of users searching for rental properties. This is truly the longtail of rental advertising.

Posted in long tail | No Comments »

Multiple Online Ad Placements Convert Higher

April 12, 2008 – 4:11 pm
A report from Atlas Institute's "How Overlap Impacts Reach, Frequency and Conversions" states that "Consumers reached across multiple publishers were twice as likely to convert as those reached only on a single publisher." Jed Flower , analyst, Atlas Institute States, “Overlap across publishers has tremendous implications for an ad campaign’s performance, marketers can no longer ignore the magnitude of reaching consumers across multiple sites.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Simi Valley Rentals Make me Melancholy

April 12, 2008 – 12:33 pm
I was surfing on rentBits for houses for rent in Simi Valley, and started thinking back to my childhood. I spent my entire childhood in Simi Valley, playing baseball, going to school and graduating from Royal High School. These memories made me sad in a good way. While searching for rentals, I was brought back to my childhood, playing hide-and-seek with my friends, selling lemonade on the corner, hitting home runs in little league. I then wanted to see what the home I grew up in would be worth today. My parents bought this home in the 70's for around $25,000. Today it is worth $500,000. I owe a lot to growing up in Simi Valley. Competition was fierce and the weakest links were left behind. Thank you Simi Valley. I owe a lot to you. More than you know................

Posted in RentBits | No Comments »

OLX Raises $13.5 Million

April 12, 2008 – 11:56 am
OLX, a distribution partner of Rent Marketer, has recently announced they have raised $13.5 million in series B funding from General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund, and DN Capital. TechCrunch says according to co-founder Fabrice Grinda, that “OLX is probably the largest classified site no one has ever heard of.” Think of OLX as a craigslist with more functionality, less spam. less scammers and better results. "We were launched in June 2006. We now generate over 1 million new ads per month (after removing over 500,000 spam ads) and over 200 million page views per month. We would not have gotten there had we not had the cash to advertise and buy a few companies." says Fabrice. How does OLX limit the amount of spammers and scammers on the free site? "We do our best to limit it through a combination of community feedback, manual review, blacklisting, etc. and are still working on our ...

Posted in Craigslist | 1 Comment »

Apartment Marketer Launches New No Risk Pricing

April 12, 2008 – 9:28 am
Apartment Marketer launches with a new look and new pricing. After months of testing and feed back from REITs, Property Managers and Owners, Apartment Marketer has launched a new innovative pricing program for apartment communities looking to fill their vacancies faster. For property managers, owners and REITs, the subscription model, (unlimited leads for a fixed monthly amount) works great if a lot of leads are being generated. The Cost Per Lead model works great if there are few leads generated. If many leads are generated the monthly cost increases dramatically. Feedback was that communities wanted the benefits of Cost Per Lead (no risk) and the benefits of subscription (a capped monthly fee). Apartment Marketer's solution. We offer a hybrid pricing model that has the benefits of the subscription model and cost per lead model. Apartment Marketer's pricing is the most unique in the industry. Here is how it works: Communities post their floor plans ...

Posted in Apartment Marketer | No Comments »

MyNewPlace Launches new Home Page for Rentals

April 11, 2008 – 5:42 pm
MyNewPlace just launched a new home page for rentals.

Posted in MyNewPlace | 4 Comments »

Apartment Marketer to Launch New Pricing and Site Shortly

April 11, 2008 – 11:14 am
Apartment Marketer will be relaunching very shortly. We have been receiving a lot of great feedback from property managers and REITs on how to structure the site and pricing. Our pricing is the most unique in the industry. Apartment Marketer is very similar to Rent Marketer by offering one place to post to many different rental and classified sites but Apartment Marketer works solely with Apartment Communities. More to come soon............

Posted in Apartment Marketer | No Comments »

Search for Foreclosures with ForeclosureRadar.com

April 10, 2008 – 9:58 pm
If you are looking for foreclosures in California and don't know where to start, check out this foreclosure search engine called foreclosureradar.com. This site is super easy to use and if you are a real estate investor can allow you to: Search thousands of new properties entering the foreclosure process Actively track every auction in California, every day. Instantly gain expertise about all California foreclosure markets.

Posted in Search Engines | No Comments »